Geotagging Hints and Tips

Daily Ink

Stored in: Flickr News

Posted On: August 29 2006

By: Bryan Partington

The Big News on flickr these days is Geotagging, that delightfully odd conjunction of 'Geographic' and 'Tagging'.

Flickr's newest feature is brilliant in its execution, particularly its interface design. By addressing many of traditional pitfalls of Geotagging applications, flickr has taken the activity to a new level of accessibility and ease of use. Only a day after the release of this new feature, flickr has built up a library of well over 600 thousand Geotagged photos., a truly astonishing adoption rate for an activity that most flickr users had never even heard of.

That said, there are still some quirks in the works, despite its being orders of magnitude better than any existing Geotagging system. Plus, it being 'flickr maps' first day on the job, some slack must be cut.

Today we're going to look at some frustrations you might encounter and some tricks and tools for dealing with them.

Kinks

1. Coverage: Yahoo! has great looking maps, but lacks street level details in many areas. If you're living in one of these areas with little to no detail, Geotagging in the flickr interface can be very frustrating. Fortunately, flickr still supports the existing Geotagging toolset. For example, you can grab the loc.alize.us bookmarklet and tag using it. For Firefox users, an even better option is the Google Maps in Flickr extension.

   When you're done tagging with those tools, simply go to flickr's Geotag Import Page and convert your tags over to the new system.

   Flickr is adding Geotagging support to its API, so once the 3rd party developers update their tools the import page shouldn't be necessary.

   Also, Yahoo! Maps has been rapidly improving of late. Over time it will cover more and more regions.

2. Search: While the system is very good at searching on city names and exact addresses, it cannot search on business or landmark names. While the flickr Geotagging interface doesn't need all the features of a local business search, it should support the most basic ones. Landmarks are often needed to allow users to find their bearings.

   Until flickr adds something like that, there are a couple options. If you don't remember the exact location of the photo you'd like to tag, you'll can to open another window or tab with Google or Yahoo! maps. I suggest trying Yahoo! Maps first because the map is exactly the same as flickr's.

3. Navigation: While flickr's interface makes it tremendously easy to gather and add photos to a map, It is more difficult to zoom in towards a photo that's already in place. Normally zooming in on a target on a map is very easy in these kinds of applications, and adding photos is more difficult, so flickr's problem is the reverse of that in many other GeoBrowsing platforms.

   This is a good problem for flickr to have, because it is an easy problem to solve. Change the functionality to center the map on any dot/photo clicked by the user. Zooming in on target would then be vastly simplified.

   In the meantime, you can double click 'immediately beside' a dot to zoom in very close to it. That'll have to do until a less finicky setup is developed. Searching by city name can also be better than 'click zooming' because it is often more accurate than clicking, especially if you're zoomed out a lot to start.

Promise

Flickr's Geotagging system allows users to do finely tuned searches of tags, group contents and other variables against location. This is novel, allowing the maximum possible use of location data. We can geographically filter almost any search on flickr, which adds a new level of awareness to the contexts that photographs emerge from.

As flickr streams grow longer and longer, the issue of retrieval becomes increasingly important. While one might not remember the date they took a photo or how they tagged it, it is much more difficult to forget the place where the photo was taken. With streams full of thousands of photos, growing each day, such tools because very important to the heavily invested flickr user.

Geotags also enable a new kind of social interaction, allowing you to discover new photographers in your area and discover how differently they see the world you walk through every day. You can also use them to journey to far away lands, not only seeing the photos but meeting the person who took them. Like a great big guide book to the world, only that guidebook is also a community.

Whether you look at this feature as a flashy new toy or a new way of seeing the world, it is difficult not to be impressed by its epic scale and ambition... and how that epic scale can be zoomed down, focused onto the day to day lives of communities all over the world.

Which brings us to our most important tip: Explore! Have Fun!

Log in to comment on this article

Otherwise, in Flickr News:

• Previously: Flickr takes on Geotagging
• Next: Yahoo! Search and The Power of Groups